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Rare penguin stolen in Germany

A rare penguin has been stolen from a zoo in Germany. Alarmed Mannheim city keepers say their missing five-kilogram bird needs special food and is untradeable. It's fitted with an identity chip and a number tag.

A spokeswomen for Mannheim's Luisen Park zoological enclosure on Monday described the theft of its Humboldt penguin as being "beyond good and evil."

Staff noticed its disappearance during a count of its some 20 birds on Saturday and concluded that the penguin had neither escaped nor been snatched by a predatory animal, she said.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Penguin Awareness Day

January 20 is Penguin Awareness Day - which is not the same as World Penguin Day on April 25. Adelie penguins and all their relatives are so great that someone decided to give them not one but two annual holidays. So in honor of this special day, DW is raising awareness of the adorable, flightless birds.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Underwater torpedoes

They can't fly and they're not great at walking either. Despite their fancy tuxedoes, penguins often look slighty clutzy on land. That all changes as soon as they hit the seas. Their streamlined bodies allow them to shoot through water like a torpedo. Even the tallest and heaviest species, the emperor penguins, can swim as quickly as 2.7 (8.9 feet) meters per second.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Beach bums

It seems like an odd combination at first: sand, sun - and penguins? But the birds don't just live in Antarctica. These guys are African penguins. A whole colony of them can be found at Simon's Town in South Africa. Sunny Australia is home to the little penguins. The smallest penguin species grows to be only 30 centimeters (12 inches) tall. Emperor penguins get to be 1.3 meters (4.3 feet).

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Sir Nils Olav

Here you see an honorary Colonel-in-Chief inspecting his troops. King penguin Brigadier Sir Nils Olav III. lives at Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland. He was knighted in 2008. In 1913, Norway presented the zoo with its first king penguin and in 1972, the King's Guard adopted one: Nils Olav I. He and his two successors at the Edinburgh Zoo have since risen through the ranks from mascot to Colonel-in-Chief.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Knitting against the Black Tide

After oil spills penguins are often cleaned by volunteers. But the gentle hands can't scrub all the oil from the birds' sticky feathers. That's why they put little wool sweaters on the penguins so they don't swallow oil trying to clean their feathers themselves. The oil also destroys the birds' isolating fat layer and the sweaters protect them from the cold.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Hollywood stars

The cute birds are also successful movie stars. Movies like "The Penguins of Madagascar" and "Happy Feet" were successful animated flicks that featured penguins as protagonists. "March of the Penguins" was a documentary about emperor penguins and the struggles they go through for their chicks. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Everything for the kids

The film shows emperor penguins during breeding season. The birds walk for weeks from the sea to their breeding spots in the middle of Antarctica's ice dessert. There the male keeps the egg on his feet. The female goes back to sea to eat. The males huddle together to keep warm in the freezing winds. When the chick hatches after 60 days of growing, the father has lost one third of his body weight.

Penguins - the coolest birds to ever wear a tux

Gay penguin love

The Bremerhaven Zoo in northern Germany wanted to breed the endangered Humboldt penguins in captivity. But because it's hard to determine the birds' gender, no one at the zoo realized for a long time that most of the animals they had were males. The penguins didn't mind and formed "gay" couples. In the absence of egg-laying females, the homosexual couples tried to hatch stones.

Author: Carla Bleiker

"We hope that the perpetrator's common sense prevails and that he quickly gives back the penguin," said a Mannheim police spokesman, referring to illegal trade in wildlife.

The penguin's head plumage sports a distinctive "face mask."

The missing bird stands half-a-meter tall and one of its wings has a tag bearing the number 53.

Pacific coastline habitat endangered

Humboldt penguins, normally at home along Peru' and Chile's rocky Pacific coastline, are on theRed List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In the wild, Humboldt penguins feed on fish types such as Peruvian anchovy, herring and squid. They breed in dirt burrows and rock crevices.

Guano harvesting depleted the species severely over the past two centuries and their numbers worldwide are put by IUCN currently at 32,000 mature individuals.

Wild penguin colonies are currently threatened by climate fluctuations and by industrial development in Chile, including the construction of coal-fired power stations and a mega port project.